The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Tuesday 6th Well, I broke the ice yesterday and plunged into learning the lines of Anne. I learned about ten pages which I will have to re-learn today, while learning another then. By tomorrow yesterday's ten will have fixed themselves in my memory, more or less, while I revise today's ten, and so on. There are quite a few pages of course which contain only a line or two while others, especially in a wordy costume piece of this kind have long uninterrupted monologues. The script is 144 pages long. I do not speak on about 35 of them. That leaves 109. At ten a day that theoretically gives me the whole part of eleven days, though in actual fact it is generally about twice as long because the period of study becomes longer and longer as more and more is committed to memory and the revision extends itself day by day. Also, there are some days when the memory refuses to take in anything at all, and one can only revise.

  The script itself is robust and unsubtle but sweeps along at a spanking pace. I hope the direction matches it. Henry is mad, I think. If I continue to think so after I've really got the part into my bones, I shall play him that way. He is certainly demonic. Great charm and stupendous outbursts of rage all co-mixed up with a brilliant cynical intelligence. I might be able to make something of it. Especially if the director and girl are good and help it all along. Since I gather that the other parts, Wolsey, Cromwell, Howard, Thomas Boleyn etc. etc. are being played by Hordern, Colicos and people of their stature I have no worries on that score.89 Especially Michael Hordern. I think him to be one of the best actors in the world and a rough adversary in a two-handed scene and hard to beat. I don't mean a selfish, spoiled actor like Rex who tries silly old-fashioned things like up-staging, and trying to distract the eye of the audience during a moment which should be yours, but someone who is so deadly perfect and precisely timed that, unless you are too, he is likely to over-balance you.

  Just before lunch as we were sitting down here in the lower house George came in looking very apologetic and said that the Governor of Jalisco's daughter was outside with the Director of Tourism for P.V. and would we have a drink with her etc.90 We said, with a huge groan from E, Caroline and I, ‘ OK’. It was as smile-fixed a meeting as one could imagine. Platitudes came out from both sides with unfailing and desperate regularity. ‘And do you like our country?’ ‘We love it, that's why we live here.’ ‘Are you here to rest.’ ‘Yes, I wear a beard because I'm just about to play the English King Henry VIII.’ ‘My father, the Governor, says to say "Hello" to you.’ ‘Would you say "Hello" back for us?’ ‘Well I see that you are going to have lunch. It was nice meeting you. If there's anything you need do not hesitate to let us know.’ ‘Thank you. How kind. We shall.’

  She had a face like a double-chinned scimitar. [...]

  Wednesday 7th [...] I went to bed early last night, about 9 and read Waugh's Put out more Flags for the umpty-ninth time.91 I shall have it by heart if I'm not careful. It is astonishing for such a careful writer how often, for a comic effect, he uses the word ‘distaste’. The first time he used it was I think in Decline and Fall and the line is something like: ‘"This is my daughter," said the headmaster, with some distaste.‘92 I remember being convulsed as a small boy. It is a good trick that he uses a lot. ‘The Brigadier looked at Basil with revulsion.‘93 But these little lapses apart, he is the writer I'd like to write like most. See Tom Thumb wanting to play Goliath, or the Elephant who dreams of being a ballerina. Anyway I'll never write anything except occasional pieces for the magazines unless I spend four or five hours a day on this diary alone, and not 30 minutes.

  [...] We are supposed to go to Jim's house for lunch but E is so late – it is now 1.30 and she has been preparing since 12.30. – I may stay here and raid the ice-box and learn some more lines. Have just heard that E has only just gone upstairs to change. Unbelievable. ‘Lunch isn't ready over there anyway,’ says Caroline stoutly in defence of E. Not the point. We're going to visit the house, the lunch is incidental. E is really fixated about time and her appearance. Even to walk around the corner to a pub for a half of bitter takes an hour's make-up. And nobody needs it less. And imagine how bad it's going to be as she gets older and less good-looking. Start in the morning for dinner at seven, I fancy. [...] I've just heard that E is ready. It is 1.45!

  Thursday 8th Well, I did not go to Jim's which turned out to be a good idea as I learned quite a lot of lines and thoroughly revised the others. I made myself a huge ‘cylffyn’ or ‘cwlffyn’ i.e. a very big sandwich.94 It consisted of a layer of krafft [sic] cheese, a layer of sliced tomato and a layer of crisp ice-cold lettuce between two well buttered thick slices of bread. Chased down by a mug of hot tea. Delicious.

  [...] I cannot stop reading Waugh. In the last two or three days I have read Scoop, Put Out More Flags, A Little Learning, Officers and Gentlemen and am just finishing Men at Arms.95 The whole thesis is a lament for the death and dissolution of the Squirearchy. They were tougher than he thought. They are still there, as established as ever. A pity for his theme. A greater pity is that he died before finishing his auto-biography. It would have been interesting to read his reactions to what is in essence a socially unchanged world. The same laws of breeding and background and school still apply. Only, it would seem, in the arts and particularly in sciences, does it not apply. No school, however eminent, can help you as a painter or writer or physicist unless you have the brains or talent. Most of the brilliant new crop of scientists which we have in GB, and are exporting to the USA, have provincial accents, I'm told. But in essence the old order never changeth.

  Friday 9th Yesterday we went fishing and trawling.

  Tuesday 13th Neither the Governor nor his mate turned up so we were spared that. Today we go to Church to ‘stand-up’ for a lovely motherless boy who is to be confirmed. His name is Sergio and he is 11 years old. He is extremely polite and his manners are exemplary though he tends to forget himself around E and likes to hug her a lot. I think we have a case of calf love on our hands. I may say it's reciprocated by E. I can just about hugging calf-love abide but draw the line at bull-love. The syntax in the last sentence leaves a lot to be desired. But then I am having a nasty attack of withdrawal from liquor and am not myself at all. I feel as stale as half a loaf in a dust-bin and as tired as a hundredth birthday and do not like going back to Europe at all. We leave for LA tomorrow, spend a day with Sara, then to NY and spend a day with Kate, then to Paris and Versailles to be presented with the Medaille d'Or and spend a night and then to London and the Dorchester and rehearsals. [...] That is not to say that I don't like Europe. I love it with a passion and could never exile myself from it for longer than a few months, but I loathe the means of getting there. Flying must be, to the initiated, the most boring and paradoxically the most nerve-wracking method of transport ever devised by mankind for his own torture. In fact show me a man or woman over the age of 20 who likes being flown, I exclude pilots and private plane-owners, and say that they have no fear, and I will show you a LIAR. In any case I have a great fondness for flying-cowards. [...] Any man who confesses to me that aeroplanes give him the screaming ab-dabs becomes a friend for life. When I first met Debbie Reynolds’ husband, Harry Karl, and when he confessed to me on the Queen Mary (I mean, of course, the ocean-going ship and not the late Dowager) that in the many hundreds of miles, hundreds of thousands of miles rather, that he is forced to travel in the course of his business, he had yet to get on a plane sober, I practically kissed him firmly on the mouth.96 He showed little taste in marrying Debbie but he obviously has an admirable talent for being craven. [...] ‘Cowards die many times before their death’, said the Swan of Avon.97 Include me in, Will. [...]

  Wednesday 14th We went to the church which is brighter and prettier than I remember but like all country R.C. churches is full of hideous but highly coloured plaster images. The boy's uncle Xavier something or other, a pretty Mexican girl, nicely pock-marked, Chas and Louise Collingwood both more plastered than any of the saints in the church, an elderly American who has, I'm told, had his face lifted t
hree times, and Caroline, Jim and George, all left from the house in body, 15 minutes late because of guess who, and en-carred for the church. I carried a massive and quite beautiful candle which is a century or more old, I gather, and proved it by refusing to remain alight. E and I knelt at the altar while for a time a band played the processional march from Aida, which I swore and believed until shown otherwise by Jim and George, was Purcell's Trumpet Voluntory(?).98 My spelling is bloody awful. The Priest went on quite a bit, seven or eight minutes, but it was rapid Spanish and I only got the random word. I heard our names a couple of times and was told later that the chap had advised the little Sergio that if he brought as much honour and renown to his country as we had to ours, he would have accomplished a great deal in life. I've a feeling that the latter sentiment would meet with general approval only in our immediate families. However it was friendly enough.

  I took an already stoned Chas Collingwood to the Oceano for a swift one before going up to the house and the champagne. He told me that Xavier was, is, Sergio's uncle and guardian and that he, Xavier, knowing himself to be a homo-sexual and fearing that the boy might become one too, arranged for him to be seduced, at the age of 12, mark you, by an accommodating Gringa. Not a whore, mind, but an obliging and easy lady. The deed was done and the boy went straight to the Priest and confessed. The same Priest who was trotting out homilies yesterday to the same boy. Charles added that the story goes on to say that this friendly lady left the boy of 12 to go on her weekly assignation with Edgar Evans (founder of the famous London String Quartet) who is going on NINETY!99 For a small town there is a lot of action. [...]

  Thursday 15th, Beverly Hills Hotel [...] Having arrived at the bungalow of the B.H. hotel we had a great pleasure of meeting two friends of George Davis. They stayed for not more than two hours and were so fascinating that I fell asleep as they were being introduced. Somebody once said, probably me, that we remember too much. We shall not have our memories over-burdened by the above-mentioned.

  Then Hugh French, to add to the general brilliance of the day, told me that the ‘sneak-previews’ of Staircase, except for one, were disastrous. Oddly enough I cared about this film but, what the hell, I'll just grow another callous. I'll end up with a mind like a miner's hands. [...]

  Monday 19th, Paris, PA [Plaza Athenée] Well, I'll tell you, as a result of people and places and Kate and fear and booze and jet-lag, particularly the penultimate, I don't know whether it's the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow.

  Some observations from a scattered survey.

  (A) Military heroes are inevitable bores. Yesterday I was stupefied by thousands of such people. They were gonged to the eyebrows but were incapable of syntactically putting a sentence together. I found myself helping them to express their adoration of Elizabeth in a language native to them but foreign to me. I thought about this phenomenon copiously and examined in absentia all the war-heroes I'd ever known and without question they are all bores. Sailor Malan, Douglas Bader, Group-Captain Cheshire, Audie Murphy and ‘Mad Jack’ Siegfried Sassoon, have, or had, the ability to stop a sentence dead in the middle of its predicate.100 Bader, said Sailor Malan, was not only fearless, but eliminated the idea of fear in others including myself. Now, any man who lacks fear is a bore. I am not a bore, he said fearlessly. I am not entirely sure that I know what I'm talking about.

  (B) Jane Swanson is something that I have missed for a long time. I think that she has been so deeply enwrapped in the mutual envy of Dick and John that I never really had the chance to talk with and to her before.101 She is very rewarding. She is also a very good listener, which is important in the case of a man who has firmly planned to go down into oblivion shouting new and brilliant stories about R. Richardson, complete with new ones unknown hitherto even to Sir Ralph. She is attractive. She is strange. She is eminently sane. She has an exquisite daughter. She speaks as no other inhabitant of this vale of tears has ever done. But principally she is essentially, quintessentially, seimentally [sic] and un-ennuimentally [sic] A LADY! [...]

  Tuesday 20th, Dorchester, London Well we made it to London alright though all of us are suffering from monumental time-lags and today is going to be a relatively full one. I have costume fittings this morning, an aspect of the business which I detest, and a reading with the full cast at 2.30 this afternoon. I know practically everybody there and met the girl yesterday afternoon for the second time so it should be a reasonably affable affair though my old bête noire Tony Quayle will also be there.102 But I've no doubt that bygones will be bygones and those tiny button eyes in that great arse of a face will be twinkling with false bonhomie. It's toughest on the girl though, having to read cold with all those old pros watching and listening. She seems much more attractive since the first time I met her in Paris. Let's hope she turns out to be not only a good ‘un but a nice ‘un. Life is too short to work with ‘temperamental’ people throwing tantrums all the time. The only girl I've had trouble with for years was Mary Ure last year and before that it was Lana Turner about 1955.103 Otherwise I've been extremely lucky. And I've worked with a great top of ladies. My own E who apart from congenital tardiness is the favourite. Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Olivia de Havilland, Edith Evans, Claire Bloom, Fay Compton, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Roberts, Jean Simmons, Dorothy McGuire, Helen Hayes, Zena Walker and my old darling Pamela Brown et al et al.104 Perhaps it's something to do with ability because neither Lana can act at all, or Mary. They merely repeat lines by rote. But I think they both think very highly of themselves and are carrying on the mantle of Rachelle and Bernhardt and Duse.105 They couldn't carry their bloody bags.

  Hugh French came over with us and went on about a TV show for E to do with Mancini, the musician, but I am still a snob about the medium.106 Thank God I can afford to be but it still seems to me the cheapest and most vulgar of the performing arts media. I suppose I don't like the thought of any lazy Tom Dick or Harry switching over to Morecambe and Wise while I'm deep in the middle of ‘To be or not to be’.107 Or some ‘young man carbuncular’ masturbating in a dingy bed-sitter while goggling at E's breasts.108 Nevertheless we shall have to do something for Harlech one of these days. [...]

  Wednesday 21st I did my fittings in the morning and it was torture as usual. Though they have very kindly done their best to make the materials as light as possible, they are still very hot and there is going to be a great deal of sweating during the next three or four months. Maggie Furse was there, of course.109 Costume designers who are not out of the top-drawer are really not worth hiring. The costumes look magnificent but all the great work is done by the two boys who cut and sew. She simply looks up Holbein and illustrated books of costumes about the period in question.110 I asked if they could change the shape of the shoes and make them come higher up the ankle as I have such idiotic calves. No, this was not possible as they were not the ‘period’. So you see she gets all her stuff from the books.

  [...] I tried to read a detective story by Gore Vidal, writing under the name of Edgar Box but did not make more than two pages before Morpheus claimed me.111 [...]

  Quayle was there and behaved exactly as I expected, eyes twinkling, much smiling, speaking his part with measured and unctuous precision. John Colicos too was there and runs Tony a pretty close second for close-set eyes. I doubt whether they could make one of Elizabeth's with both sets put together. His voice too was measured and sonorous. In fact they were both so ‘stagey’ that I found myself gruffing mine up and speaking at great pace rather than be like them. Still they are well cast – after all both Cromwell and Wolsey were sly and unctuous bastards. Not that Colicos in private life is a double-crossing promiser like Quayle. I'm told he is a very nice man. We had worked together many years ago in Wuthering Heights on TV in NY but I don't remember him at all.112 Fortunately I had been warned by the director before hand so was able to make suitable cries of delighted remembrance.

  The girl is very small in every way, in height, in weight and vocally. I could out-project her
with a whisper. Her face too is tiny but the eyes and mouth are good. In size and pertness only, she reminds me of the late and lamented Vivien Leigh. It's difficult to tell at a reading but I think she might have difficulty with long sustained speeches, but doubtless we'll be able to fiddle around that with judicious cuts to listening faces etc. and a spot of dubbing. She said one sensible thing à la Elizabeth: when they brought those inevitable tedious cardboard models of the sets around she said ‘Those dolls houses mean absolutely nothing to me.’ Quite right too. [...]

  Thursday 22nd [...] Yesterday I rehearsed the song I have to sing in the film. It's very pretty but for an amateur, because of funny little stops in it, difficult to learn at such short notice. I record it this morning.

  The doorbell rang yesterday morning about 11, and standing there was my niece Sian with an inevitable friend. Five minutes later another ring and it was Graham with an equally inevitable friend.113 Why must they bring total strangers around with no advance notice? Showing off I suppose, but it shows a staggering amount of not understanding the kind of lives we are forced to live. E refused to come out to see them which is just as well because when she did come out later after the family had gone and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and the director of the Investiture were here her cold charmlessness was ice-bergian.114 Ordinary social charm is not E's strong suit. She was lovely with the Loseys who came for lunch, but there was an oddly constricted atmosphere even with them and there were rather forced silences when nobody seemed to have anything to say.

  Every encounter indeed that day was so dispiriting that it put me in a foul mood. I went into the spare room and played the song over and over to myself singing with it until I thought I'd got it. Despite all that concentration however I can't remember a phrase of it this morning. It will all come back of course as soon as I listen to it once more. Elizabeth was as bare-toothed as a tigress when I went into the other room and said ‘Surely you must know it by now!’ This was delivered with sullen venom and set my ill-temper even more firmly. Thereafter we played an absurd game of Musical Rooms. I refused to be in the same room as E and she with me, but we kept on running into each other. Finally she went to bed in the spare room while I read in the other bedroom until the doctor came. I then woke her up, told her I was going to take two sleeping pills, that I was going straight to bed and not to bother me! And with that he swep’ aht! What a fool I am.